phpBB history

phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela joined the development team after phpBB's CVS repository was moved to SourceForge.net, and work on version 1.0.0 began. A fully functional, pre-release version of phpBB was made available in July.[4]

phpBB 1.0.0 was released on December 16, 2000,[5] with subsequent improvements to the 1.x codebase [6] coming in two more major installments. The final release in the 1.x line was phpBB 1.4.4, released on November 6, 2001. During the lifetime of the 1.x series, Bart van Bragt, Paul S. Owen (former co-manager of the project), Jonathan Haase and Frank Feingold joined the team. phpBB 1.x is no longer supported and virtually no websites continue to use it.

In February 2001, phpBB 2.0.x began development entirely from scratch; the developer's ambitions for phpBB had outgrown the original codebase. Doug Kelly joined the team shortly afterwards. After a year of development and extensive testing, phpBB 2.0.0, dubbed the "Super Furry" version, was released on April 4, 2002, three days later than intended.[7]phpBB forums are used frequently with multiplayer online game sites (this forum using 'Solaris' template).

Work on phpBB 3.0.x began in late 2002. It was originally intended to be released as phpBB 2.2, and the first planned feature list was announced on May 25, 2003.[8] However, as development progressed, the developers realised that phpBB 2.1.x (the development release cycle for 2.2) had eliminated virtually all compatibility with the 2.0.x line, so the version number for release was changed to 3.0.0, in keeping with the Linux kernel versioning scheme, which phpBB followed at the time.[9] In September 2005, Paul Owen resigned as the Development Team Leader and Meik Sievertsen was promoted to the role.

In March 2007, the phpBB team launched their new website, powered by phpBB3 with the new prosilver style.[10] The prosilver style was originally not intended to be revealed until the final release of phpBB 3.0.0.[citation needed]